Wednesday, January 5, 2011

It may be very un-finnish to enjoy going to Ikea so much, a rival Swedish company, but I'm not all that concerned.

A couple of days ago I was supposed to go to the beach with some friends, but it was kind of overcast and noone really felt like driving all the way down to the beach just for the weather to be miserable, so we decided to go the park and have a bit of a picnic, which turned out to be really good fun. But it rained there too, so we had to pack up shop and the general consensus was to go to Ikea.

So we all went to Ikea, and it was a very exciting moment for me.
After coming back from Finland, I've kind of been in a Finnish void for a year, there are not many things which you can get in Australia that are authentically Finnish, or even nordic. So when you go to a place where a lot of the signs are in Swedish and they have all the food and accessories you were so used to eating and seeing during a year and haven't been able to get for ages, something just snaps, and you go a little crazy.

It was soooo nice to spend some time in the cafeteria, with all the precision of those back in school in Finland, and just to eat some of the food that I hadn't tried for ages. I had the meatballs with some lingonberry sauce, and a piece of Daim cake, but that isn't really important.

For me, it was just really nice for a moment to be taken back to a lot of the things that I became really familiar with during my exchange year, I even saw a couple of Swedes while I was there. So it was a good trip, and I shall definitely be heading back pretty soon.

Oh, and I'm also waiting for a Finnish cookbook to come in the mail, it looks like its going to be pretty awesome, it's even got recipes for Karelian Pasties and stuff like that, and I've tried really hard to find those, but to no avail. So I'll be doing an uber excited blogpost about that.